Sunday, February 17, 2008

Iraq: More Success

Damn, we gotta quit successin' so much, it's startin' to hurt.

Raw Story tells us that U.S. troops in Iraq have fired on Sunni allies, killing three people. The troops claim that the Sunni group "mistakenly" fired on them first, and they returned fire. This is the third such incident within the past month. A total of 19 Sunni "allies" have been killed, and 12 others injured.

Let's see now, originally we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, was a "brutal dictator" (aided, of course, by U.S. taxpayer monies, and pictures of him shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld around the time that he received several tons of nerve gas that he used on Kurdish Iraqis are freely available on teh Googlez).

So we were on the side of the Kurds and freedom and against Saddam Hussein, even though we gave him money and weapons to kill Kurds. Got that. 911!!

Saddam Hussein favoured his Sunni Muslim brethren and even though they are a minority (by a small margin) of Iraqi Arabs, they got the best jobs, etc. So when we invaded, we sided with the Shia Muslim Arab Iraqi majority and helped them to kick a bunch of Sunni Muslims out of power. Got that.

But that didn't work out so good, because the Sunni Muslims who were in power when Saddam was around were mostly just your average yob, trying to work and feed their families, and they got kinda pissed off that their erstwhile neighbours were taking over their houses and kicking them out of their jobs, so they started fighting back. So the insurgency was largely a Sunni insurgency, although Donald Rumsfeld said we shouldn't call it an insurgency at all. Got that.

Meanwhile, the Kurds were, like, our friends and everything, because Saddam Hussein had used (our) nerve gas and other weapons (paid for by our dollars) to kill them. So even though we encouraged them to rebel against Saddam Hussein during the First Gulf War, and then left and Saddam Hussein got to bomb the crap out of them, they're still our friends. Got that.

So while the Sunnis were biting holes in our collective ass, it didn't help that Moqtada al-Sadr and his Shia followers who had fought Hussein for decades were being totally ignored by the U.S. in cobbling together a puppet government. So they started taking bites out too. Then the Shia "governmental" factions &mdash SCIRI (now SIIC), Da'wa, and Fadhila parties, all retrograde Islamic theocratic parties who dream of establishing a Shia Caliphate &mdash started fighting each other for control of Iraq's oil, and were not above attacking U.S. military personnel. But waitaminnit, they're supposed to be teh good guyz, even if they are "Islamofascimunists." OK, got that.

Then it turned out that having an armed Sunni insurgency killing, oh, around FOUR THOUSAND U.S. military while we were successfully occupying their peaceful country in which over 1 million civilians have been killed, 4-5 million others displaced and turned into refugees fleeing for their lives, and perhaps another 2 million wounded, crippled, and otherwise maimed, was not such a great idea. And we should try to make friends with these "insurgents," and win them over to our side. So we gave them a bunch of money, guns, and bombs so they would be our friends and stop fighting each other and fight "al Qaeda" which doesn't seem to be such a big player among all the numerous factions out in Iraq, and in fact seems to be headquartered in our other big success, Afghanistan, where it's causing trouble with our friends the Pakistanis. Got that.

Meanwhile, some of our soldiers decided it would be fun to stalk, rape, and murder a teenage Iraqi girl, so they did. And they murdered her whole family, and set fire to the bodies so no one would know that the girl had been gang-raped and murdered. Except it turned out that the girl &mdash Abeer Qasim Hamza &mdash is a member of one of the biggest and most powerful Sunni tribes, the al-Janabi. Um, oopsie. So is it true, like people say, that in the Near Eastern countries, tribal loyalties mean a great deal? Like, you know, people named al-Janabi, or belonging to the al-Janabi tribe might, maybe, hold a grudge against American military because some of their people raped a member of their tribe?

Then our NATO partner, Turki, was getting kinda annoyed because the Kurdish PKK guerillas, who are fighting for a united Kurdistan, were blowing up stuff in Turki (which has a significant Kurdish minority population), and then retreating across the border into Kurdish areas of Iraq. So, even though the Kurds are! our! friends!, we started secretlygivingintelligence on Kurdish PKK hideouts in Iraq to our Turkishfriends! who promptly bombed the shit out of the Kurds. Who are our friends.

Damn, all this successful successin' is just too fucking confusing for us. There must be somebody out there who can figure out just who the fuck our friends are and who our enemies are in this unholy mess.

Meanwhile, in other late-breaking news, a woman suicide bomber has blown herself up in a Baghdad shopping mall; a suicide bomber killed 80 people in the southern Afghani town of Kandahar; and the Pentagon states that there will be more U.S. troops in Iraq after the "drawdown" (huh?).

And Bush's friend, Prince Bandar of the House of Saud (whose country generously supplied 15 of the 19 terrorists responsible for the September 11th attacks on the U.S.), has been doing some stenchful deals for military might with U.K. companies, and threatening the UK with terrorist attacks if they investigate bribes that were paid to him.

The Boston Globe tells us that the Saudi government provided the September 11th terrorists with financial and logistics support in their quest to destroy the Twin Towers. While the New Yorker (Seymour Hersh, the most trusted name in news) tells us that the Saudi government has given a great deal of financial support to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Why is the Bush family personal friends with these people? Isn't it treason to befriend people who carry out or finance a military attack on your country?